Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  “I was leaving him,” she said. “I never said it. But he knew. I was setting him free.” She lifted her drink and took a big gulp. The admission weighed her down, sinking her shoulders, the hot shame of it caving her chest. “I never should have married him. I didn’t mean it. The love…yes. The life…no.”

  “This isn’t your fault, Randie,” he said. “You didn’t do this.”

  He’d been trained in this particularly difficult area of police work, and he knew that folks grappling with sudden death often blame themselves to some degree, even when it makes no sense. He’d felt such a stab of guilt after his uncle William’s death—even though he’d been nowhere near the traffic stop that took his life, wasn’t even in the state—that he’d lost a few weeks in a nearly blinding depression over the loss of his favorite uncle, the man he’d considered his North Star, the light by which his life was guided. He didn’t sleep or eat with any regularity, and his grades suffered, making the decision to leave law school that much easier. William had been killed by a suspect he’d pulled over for expired tags, shot twice in the face as soon as he approached the driver’s window. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t Darren’s fault. And joining the Rangers wouldn’t bring William back. He knew all that. But years later, he was still wearing the badge.

  “I’m the reason he came here,” Randie said finally.

  “What do you mean?” He remembered the scene in Geneva’s suddenly, the tense moment playing out right before he got the medical examiner’s report. “The guitar,” he said, trying to follow. “Michael was bringing it to Lark?”

  “He was chasing a love story.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He must have told me a dozen times,” she said, a bittersweet smile finding its way to her lips. “The story behind that guitar. He grew up with it. It’s what he wanted to believe about us. A love that turns your life around in a single day, a love that changes everything.” She reached across the table for her drink and downed the rest. “His uncle, Booker, used to tell the story all the time.”

  “Booker Wright?” He’d seen the name on Joe Sweet’s Wikipedia page.

  She nodded and ran her finger around the rim of her glass, repeating the name. “Booker.”

  He played bass in a band with Joe Sweet. That’s the way the story always began, she said. Sometime around 1967, Booker and Joe were doing a string of gigs with Bobby Bland. Starting in Detroit, Gary, and Columbus, up north, then down through Missouri, Kansas City, and Joplin, then on to Little Rock. They were heading into Houston that summer, had a few dates set for the Eldorado Room and the Pin-Up Club. They’d met in Chicago in the late fifties, Joe and Booker, and had played as a team for most of their careers, either doing session work for local labels that produced rhythm and blues or crashing chitlin’ circuit tours, playing backup for Etta James and Wilson Pickett, Johnnie Taylor and O. V. Wright, even one time jumping on a run of shows with Otis Redding in Atlanta and the Carolinas. They were men who roamed, forever on one highway or another, off to the next town, the next gig, sleeping in motels that would rent to colored folks or in their car—a ’59 Impala they shared the note on. Neither was married, though Booker kept girls in several cities, and neither was looking. It was music first and where they could make a dollar second. They hopped on Highway 59 just outside Texarkana, heading south to Houston, speeding through the East Texas woods, where Booker was raised. He and Joe were in the first car, some other cats from Bobby’s band following behind, chasing a dream, too. Multiple telegrams had made their way to Don Robey, and there was talk he could get them a spot on a revue he was putting together, something steady around Houston. They thought Robey might actually let them lay something down on wax, recording under their own band name, the Joe Sweet Midnight Revelers.

  It looked for all the world like this was their big break, a shot at signing with Peacock Records. A new sharkskin suit or two had been purchased, and pairs of Stacy Adams had been polished in the front seat of the Impala, Booker with a kit at his feet, brush and polish in hand, as Joe drove them down Highway 59.

  And this is where the story always took its turn, the way Booker told it. Joe ain’t ever make it to Houston, he told Michael, who told Randie, who told Darren now, sitting across from him in a one-room juke joint not that far from the one Joe and Booker rolled up to one July night forty-some years earlier.

  It was called Geneva’s, and it resembled a very well-constructed shack, with sanded wooden slats and scalloped shingles on a roof that was strung with tiny colored bulbs. It had been built by hand, the kind of homey place that looked like it catered to Negro folk traveling on the north–south main line in and out of East Texas. There was no gas pump back then; there was barely what you could call a kitchen, just a pit out back and four burners on a mint-green porcelain stove. And no staff, of course. Just a woman called Geneva who opened the door for them at a quarter past eleven at night, even though she had already closed. There were six in their party, and they were hungry and not ready to make the rest of their trek through Klan country, where city law met its ugly, racist cousin in the faces of small-town cops and rural sheriffs—not on an empty stomach, at least. Geneva fried up a few pork chops with onions and thinly sliced potatoes and let them root around in the cooler she kept out back. For three quarters, they could each have a couple of beers and a nip or two of the gin she didn’t have a license for.

  Wasn’t long before they got to jamming a little, once Geneva said she didn’t mind a little music. She wasn’t but a few months past twenty-one years old, and a party was all right by her. She owned a few blues records herself but had never gone past Timpson, had never seen a live show, so this was something. Joe had his guitar out first, the Gibson Les Paul on which so many people’s fates turned—Joe’s and then Michael’s and now Randie’s and Darren’s. Geneva stopped dead in her tracks when she heard him play.

  Joe was nearing thirty. He was a dark-skinned man in a pale blue cotton shirt rolled to his elbows, and the ropy muscles in his forearms danced with each note he picked. He was playing a piece of a Lightnin’ Hopkins number, Better make it up in your mind, baby… little girl, do you know you traveling a little too slow, and he kept his eyes on Geneva as she set a steaming plate in front of him, his nearly black eyes peering into her wide, oval ones, lit gold from the gas lamps dangling overhead. As Joe sang the words to her, Booker watched what was happening, felt a current tickle the air around them, felt the one-room cafe grow warm, damp with the breath of seven people packed in a tiny shack on a summer night—five people too many, by the looks on Joe’s and Geneva’s faces. Never in his whole life had Booker seen two people home in on each other like that. Time Joe walked in, Geneva never took her eyes off him, and he watched her move as she cooked, the way she ducked her head to the beat while flipping meat, twirling onions in pork fat. He picked that guitar and watched her hips sway in a damp chambray dress. Tommy and Bones, runaways from Bobby’s band, played a set next while Booker got good and drunk, double-fisting Joe’s untouched beers and the flask they kept in the Impala’s glove box as Houston slowly slipped away.

  He didn’t remember losing track of Joe, only that at some point the food had been eaten and the plates were still sitting on the table. Bones, Tommy, and Amon Richmond, another one of Bobby’s boys, were talking about getting back on the highway, thought they could make it to Houston by sunrise, unless ol’ girl had a place they could stay. Because of the booze, Booker couldn’t remember if he was sent outside to ask Geneva if they could crash on her floor or to tell Joe it was time to leave. He didn’t even really remember how he knew they were outside—except where else could they be?—and anyway he had to relieve himself in a way that felt epic. He was just getting his fly down when he saw the two of them backed up against an oak tree, Joe’s shirt sticking to the skin on his back and sweat running down Geneva’s neck as Joe ran a hand up under her thin cotton dress. Booker felt weird holding his johnson while this was going on, and he quickly slipped back
inside. Joe came into the cafe a few minutes later and said he wasn’t going to Houston. They were welcome to spend the night—at this Geneva nodded, already acting like it was her decision as much as his—but Joe was staying in Lark.

  It broke Booker’s heart in a way he wouldn’t understand for years to come. It was a betrayal first and foremost; there would be no Joe Sweet Midnight Revelers now. But it also lit up some deficit Booker felt in his own life: of all the women he had bedded, pressed up against in the nighttime, not one of them would he want to look at come sunrise. He hoped Joe didn’t wake up with any regrets, but either way, Booker wouldn’t be around to see it, didn’t even want to look him in the eye by daylight. Joe let him keep the car, and in the frantic rush to pack the Impala—grown men avoiding any moment of silence that might be filled with talk of hurt feelings—Joe’s Les Paul got packed back into the car. Booker was about ten miles outside Space City before he realized it was in the backseat.

  There were good intentions over the years, plans to return it, but over the rest of his career, whether his front mind knew he was doing it or not, he never found himself on Highway 59 again—not through East Texas, at least. In fact none of the Wrights returned to Texas. There was always another way to Chicago, his adopted home; the heart always has a workaround. Joe Sweet was like a brother to him, and it was a loss that ate at him for years, compounded greatly when he heard that Joe died before Booker ever got a chance to make peace. When Booker got diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he left the guitar to his nephew, along with a note about a pretty brown lady down in East Texas to whom it rightly belonged.

  “That’s beautiful,” Darren said.

  Randie shrugged. She was into her second drink by now, and he was cozying up to his third, right on the line between a nice time and a mistake. “Too good to be true,” she said flatly. But Darren didn’t buy her cynicism. Joe and Geneva, they’d made it more than forty years; it was real, and they both knew it, even if they didn’t recognize that kind of loving devotion in their own lives.

  “Not a romantic, huh?” he said, picking beneath the surface of her doubt, wondering what made a woman hear a story like that and turn her back on it.

  “I resent it, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Telling that story was a way for Michael to suggest I didn’t love him enough to leave the road for him,” she said. “It was manipulative and unfair.”

  Darren found himself taking Michael’s side, not realizing until the words were coming out of his mouth how much they sounded like Lisa’s. “Maybe it was just love. Maybe he just wanted you home as much as he could have you there.”

  At least he wanted to believe that’s what Lisa wanted. She’d accepted the idea of him as a Ranger behind a desk, but joining the task force, his push to do more work in the field, had changed something between them. The boots and the truck, the shining five-point star, it was all of a piece of Lone Star swagger that drew a stark contrast between the young law student she’d married and the man life had demanded he become. It terrified him to consider that maybe their marriage had been built on conditions in fine print he never bothered to study, requirements his wife had buried beneath a thousand kisses, a thousand times she said she loved him. “Maybe he wasn’t forcing you to make a choice,” he said, a wistful hope in his expression that lay naked his own unease around the subject of marital constancy. He looked across the table at Randie, smiling tightly, attempting to play the moment light but failing. By then the band was playing a Sam Cooke song, a slow drag hoping to freeze a moment in time. To say it’s time to go, and she says, yes, I know, but just stay one minute more.

  Darren felt something painful settle in his gut then, saw clearly what he’d been previously unable to face, as if the truth had pulled up a seat at the table and offered to buy the next round. His eyes watered slightly, blurring the neon beer signs on the walls into a kaleidoscope of liquid color. He felt at sea against a rising tide, and he gripped the half-empty glass of bourbon in his hand tightly.

  Randie nodded at the ring on his left hand. “What about you?”

  She was opening a door, he knew; it was an invitation to talk if he wanted to. Her hand inched the slightest bit across the table, and he had a panicked thought that she might reach out and touch him, that the simplest kindness would break him and make him say things out loud he still didn’t want to believe. He and Lisa—he wasn’t sure they were going to make it. He leaned back in his chair and built a dam for the rising emotion from the loose stones in another man’s marriage, pivoting back to the case.

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  There was a blues-filled beat of silence before she spoke.

  “The white girl,” she said, shrugging as if she knew this was coming.

  “I don’t know if anything happened,” he said carefully.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” she said.

  He suddenly remembered Lynn’s words out back of the icehouse. Some people never learn.

  “White women?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Around here it does.”

  Randie sighed and looked away. In profile, she looked younger somehow. By daylight hours, he’d put her at thirty-six or thirty-seven, but in this darkened bar, the low light kissed by amber and rose from the neon signs, the skin on her face was so smooth, and her features so tiny, that she looked girlish, even more so when she raised her glass to the bartender, a plump girl in her twenties who was talking on one phone while texting on another. Darren laid a hand on Randie’s arm to stop her. He couldn’t come back from a fourth drink, but neither could he resist if it showed up at his table. He was still touching her arm when Randie said, “There were women—black, white, who knows? I don’t know how many. He never said, and I never asked.” She fell silent for a long moment, glancing toward the guitarist on stage, a man in his seventies wearing a gray wide-lapel suit. “I was gone a lot.”

  “None of this is your fault, Randie.”

  “Never said it was.”

  “I’m not trying to hurt you.” But he had been trying to deflect his own pain. He said softly, “I just wanted to let you know there may be some connection between your husband and another woman.”

  “I knew that was a possibility when I got on the plane,” she said. “And I’m still here.”

  She ordered another drink anyway, and so did he, as he told her his suspicion that Michael left the bar with Missy, that Keith had found them on the farm road, that this was where the initial confrontation had taken place.

  Something in the story still didn’t fit.

  He felt it like a ghost limb, something missing on his body, an itch he wanted to get at but couldn’t. The bourbon and the music, the heat rising from the bodies in the room dancing to a Jackie Wilson song the band was playing. It all swirled, and he couldn’t get his thoughts together.

  At one point Randie said something he couldn’t hear above the bass player, and he’d had to lean in so close that strands of her hair brushed his cheek. She turned and, her lips sticky from her sweet drink, whispered in his ear.

  “I was a shitty wife.”

  Darren placed a hand on her back. She leaned in so he could return a whisper in her ear. “There is sufficient evidence that I’ve been a shitty husband.”

  14.

  THEY QUIT drinking shortly after the band’s first set because it had grown loud and difficult to get the bartender’s attention. So they were both still walking straight when they left the roadside bar. Still, Darren tossed the keys to Randie and asked her to drive. She was a drink behind him, and that seemed like sound enough logic, until they arrived at the Chevy, parked on the other side of the gravel lot. She looked so small standing beside the driver’s-side door that he couldn’t believe he’d ever let her behind the wheel. The Chevy was parked on the north side of the building, which was painted a deep blue that nearly blended with the night sky around it. The bar had only a single exterior ligh
t, a tin barn light affixed over the front door. The light was too weak to turn corners, which is why he didn’t see the blood at first. He actually smelled it before he saw it. This had less to do with his law enforcement training than with his boyhood in Camilla, where his uncles, if one or both of them was lucky enough to bag a buck for the season, used to drain deer carcasses off the back porch, letting the iron-rich blood soak the grass and making Darren hold the hose to run the waste down the hill behind the house, a river of blood that sank into the earth and left a copper-scented tinge in the air until the next hard rain.

  Tonight there was a bunch of it leaking out of the driver’s side of the truck. Darren told Randie to step back. He’d lost his flashlight in the bayou. He had another one inside the truck, of course, but he wasn’t touching anything until he knew what this was. He used the flashlight on his phone to brighten the scene. There were fat drops of blood, dried nearly black, on the pebbles and gravel stones by the left side of the truck, but there was nothing on the door itself.

  “What is that?” Randie said.

  Darren didn’t answer. Instead he pulled out the tail of his shirt and used the fabric to cover his hand while he opened the door. Soon as he did, the head of a red fox flopped out along the side of the truck. Its throat had been slit, and blood was starting to gum up around the wound, black clumps of it clinging to the animal’s fur. Someone had slit the fox’s throat and placed it in the cab of Darren’s truck. Randie screamed when she saw it, and again Darren told her to step away from the car. “Don’t touch anything,” he said. His mind was racing as he turned and looked both ways up and down Highway 59, as he scanned every inch of the bar’s parking lot. He saw no one, heard only the music inside the bar, the bass and drums thrumming against his rib cage. He was struck less by the symbolism of the sacrificed animal—the wily fox punished for his cunning, his trespass into woods not his own—than he was with the realization that he and Randie had been followed, the possibility that they were being tracked. He flipped the latch on his holster, making sure the Colt was at the ready, then he dragged the carcass from the truck with his bare hands, ruining his last good shirt. He tore it off and stood breathing heavily in his undershirt as he laid the animal in the tall grass at the edge of the parking lot. Using rags he kept in a lockbox in the bed of his truck, he wiped off as much of the blood as he could and, in the process, confirmed his suspicion that the fox had been slaughtered elsewhere and then carefully placed in his truck, which had been entered without the least sign of a break-in. But somebody over the county line had blood on his hands tonight.